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Watching Movies With Sissy Spacek

In the Arms of Memory

By RICK LYMAN

Published: February 1, 2002

This article is part of a series of discussions with noted directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers and others in the film industry. In each article, a filmmaker selects and discusses a movie that has personal meaning.

SISSY SPACEK remembers wandering down to the drug store in Quitman, the small East Texas town where she grew up, and picking out an empty cigar box that she could use to hide her treasures. "I think I had a couple of school pictures of secret boyfriends, stuff like that," Ms. Spacek said. "I took it out in the back yard and buried it, but I used my feet to measure where I did it. I even made a map. But when I went back to dig it up, my feet had grown and I never could find it again. It's still out there, I guess."

Ms. Spacek, 52, was sitting in the middle row of a small screening room in a glass tower on Park Avenue, the light from the opening moments of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) playing across her familiar freckled face. Behind the film's credits, the camera moved across the worn, dirty contents of a child's cigar box. There were some marbles, a couple of carved figurines, a broken watch, a pocket knife. Elmer Bernstein's score began as a series of single notes, as if pecked out on the piano by a child using one finger.

"That whole idea of these kids with their little secret box and all the trinkets in it, it really spoke to me," Ms. Spacek said. "I couldn't help but think about my own cigar box. And I remember the way the whole movie plays through the eyes of the children. I just remember seeing their dirty little fingernails and their dirty faces and the way they're running around, playing in the courthouse. I used to go down and play in the courthouse, too, and it looked a lot like the one in this movie. I'm sure the county records have never been the same since."

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee — her only published book — "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the story of Atticus Finch, a humble and impeccably decent lawyer in a small Southern town at the height of the Depression. A middle-age widower (played by Gregory Peck in his only Oscar- winning role), Atticus is seen primarily through the eyes of his two children, a son named Jem (Philip Alford), making his first tentative steps toward maturity, and the story's narrator, a daughter named Jean Louise (Mary Badham), or Scout.

"I think they captured so well how children are drawn to what is mysterious and scary, the way they concoct stories to test and frighten themselves," Ms. Spacek said. "I'm sure I saw this for the first time in a movie theater, probably the Gem Theater in Quitman, where they had a separate entrance for the blacks, who had to sit upstairs in the balcony. And downstairs in the courthouse, I remember, they had separate bathrooms for `colored women' and `white ladies.' I wandered into the `colored' bathroom once, just because I wanted to see what it was like in there, you know, and there was this big black woman who looked at me and said, `What are you doing in here?' I ran out as fast as I could."

After gaining her first national attention with a supporting role in a 1972 Lee Marvin thriller called "Prime Cut," Ms. Spacek very quickly became one of the top female stars of the decade, widely regarded as one of the most fertile periods in American filmmaking. She worked with Terrence Malick in "Badlands" (1973), Brian De Palma in "Carrie" (1976) and Robert Altman in "Three Women" (1977) before winning an Oscar as the country singer Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter" (1980), one of her five Academy Award nominations.

In more recent years, she has largely played supporting roles in films like Oliver Stone's "J. F. K." (1991), Paul Schrader's "Affliction" (1997) and David Lynch's "Straight Story" (1999). That history gives the flavor of a full-fledged comeback to her current success in the small, independent film "In the Bedroom," for which she has won a Golden Globe Award and is widely expected to be an Oscar nominee again.

Working on Two Levels

As a child, Ms. Spacek said, "To Kill a Mockingbird" spoke to her because it evoked so many feelings and images from her small town. "I thought it was a children's movie when I first saw it," she said. "And I was overwhelmed with the familiarity of the world that they lived in. Not until later, when I saw it as an adult, did I understand the deeper dimensions of it. It's so rare to have a film hold up over so many years, and to have seen it from two such different perspectives, yet to have it work for you on both levels so deeply."

Not only the film's director, Robert Mulligan, but also its screenwriter, Horton Foote, and its producer, the future director Alan J. Pakula, came to the movies from the world of 1950's live television, and "To Kill a Mockingbird" has something of the feel of the urgent, naturalistic black-and-white dramas of that period. But "To Kill a Mockingbird," like many of the best films of the early 1960's, is also a bridge between the kitchen-sink theatricality of live television and the emerging, rougher style of acting and storytelling that took root later in the 60's and then flourished in the 70's. It is also a story about remembering, so it is no surprise that watching it evokes a flood of memories for Ms. Spacek, who says the words "I remember" more often than any others in the course of the screening.